Thanks Glen, I got carried away. I meant 'public record of our
identity' in a very hand-wavy way, thinking of the single-line entries
I've looked up in older publicly released census records. I didn't
know that I could opt-in to the eventual release (that must be new).
I think the list will agree that StatsCan privacy mechanisms are still
generally poorly understood, even after a fair amount of news coverage
on the topic... and it's increasingly hard to try to correct popular
misconceptions of enlightened policy in the current media environment.
[1] Had the conservatives tried to do a status-quo census they would
have had exactly one new cycle -- when the media decides its time to
write census stories two weeks before-hand -- to get their point of
view across.
Anyway, back to the idea of citizen data privacy: there are probably
boundaries that should be drawn with respect to what sorts of
information the state (any state - fed, state, municipal) can
systematically collect. I don't know what they are, but I can imagine
a citizen privacy manifestos along the lines of this older web 2.0
one:
http://gigaom.com/2008/01/08/a-privacy-manifesto-for-the-web-20-era/Interested to hear your thoughts... unless people are sick of the topic.
Jennifer
[1] Obama has a really hard time with this, and I expect the Can. news
media to be in even worse shape:
http://www.kenauletta.com/2010_01_25_whitehouse.htmlearlier, Glen wrote: ------------------------>
>I think, in an open data world, it makes sense to be very choosy about the
>facts that are tied to the permanent public record of our identity...
This comment suggests that individual information from a census would be
made available to all in a future Open Data universe.
No one in the Open Data community that I have spoken to are advocating this.
The aggregate information, freely available and unencumbered by restrictive
licenses, is what is wanted. Personal and private information collected
should not, and, in my understanding, cannot (given present Census and
privacy legislation in Canada) be released in the Census.
And Tracey, can you help me here: Is there a permanent record of an
individual's Census replies kept by StatsCan? If so, for how long?
Thanks,
Glen
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